phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

, contour describes speech sounds that behave as single segments but make an internal transition from one quality, place, or manner to another. Such sounds may be tones,

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

s, or

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...

s. Many

tone language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

s have contour tones, which move from one level to another. For example,

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...

has four lexical tones. The high tone is level, without contour; the falling tone is a contour from high pitch to low; the rising tone a contour from mid pitch to high, and, when spoken in isolation, the low tone takes on a dipping contour, mid to low and then to high pitch. They are transcribed with series of either

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s or

tone letter Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones. __TOC__ Chao tone letters (IPA) A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the ...

s, which with proper font support fuse into an iconic shape: . In the case of vowels, the terms diphthong and

triphthong In phonetics, a triphthong (, ) (from Greek τρίφθογγος, "triphthongos", literally "with three sounds," or "with three tones") is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick but smooth movement of the articulator from one vowel q ...

are used instead of 'contour'. They are vowels that glide from one

place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...

to another, as in English ''boy'' and ''bow.'' They are officially transcribed with a non-syllabic sign under one of the vowel letters: , . Howhever, when there is no chance of confusion, the diacritic is often omitted for simplicity. The most common contour consonants are by far the affricates, such as English ''ch'' and ''j.'' They start out as one manner, a stop, and release into a different manner, a

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

, but behave as single consonants: , . Other types of transition are attested in consonants, such as prenasalized stops in many African languages and

nasal release In phonetics, a nasal release is the release of a stop consonant into a nasal. Such sounds are transcribed in the IPA with superscript nasal letters, for example as in English ''catnip'' . In English words such as ''sudden'' in which historically ...

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...

, the

retroflex trill The voiced retroflex trill is a sound that has been reported in Toda and confirmed with laboratory measurements. Peter Ladefoged transcribes it with the IPA symbol that is normally associated with the retroflex flap, . Although the tongue start ...

of Toda, the trilled affricate of Fijian, voicing contours , in ǃXóõ,Miller (2003) believes that !Xoo is phonemically breathy-voiced and that the devoicing is because of a wider glottis than is the case in, for example, Hindustani. The nature of the voiced ejectives is unclear. and even click contours ( airstream contours) in

Khoisan languages The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of ...

such as Nǁng, which start with a lingual (velaric) airstream mechanism and release with either a pulmonic mechanism ('' linguo-pulmonic'' clicks such as , ) or an ejective mechanism ('' linguo-glottalic'' clicks such as , ).

References

{{Reflist Phonology

See also

References